The American Wife Pt. 1

The American White Wife:What do a lot of white hubbies fear? That really is an important question when you come to think about it, and I would say it don’t only rest with white hubbies but with just every husband out there in the world (although I wouldn’t know if such applies to Eskimos or those who inhabit the wide sparse of arid habitation called Siberia, but please accept the humour and let’s move on).

For the purpose of keeping this straight, we’re going to focus on white hubbies and their lovely wives.

Every hubby carries a weighty fear of his wife and whatever she might be indulging into behind his back. Unless of course the hubby has got his mind all focused on work and making money to care about where his other half is or has been. The white wife has been the ultimate trophy woman since time immemorial. In the U.S., no place was this more evident than in the case of the American South. We can wonder why folks like the KKK ever got the temerity to go after coloured individuals, but we can look past the skin and see what lay hidden behind the southern white man’s prejudiced mind. This subject of keeping the white woman chaste and harboured by societal restrictures has been in vogue much through the early times of the twentieth century and well into ‘50s America. Hers was pictured into a model of a typical housewife: staying indoors mending to the kids’ welfare and meeting with her female friends to play bridge and pass along dirty gossip of whatever’s lurking deep underneath Suburbia America’s backyard. How was she ever to know that they laid cracks under the shell? That the world was changing and most especially that she too was changing?

Then came the cultural revolution of the 60s, and like the messianic words of W.B. Yeats, ‘Things had indeed fallen apart and the centre could no longer be made whole again’. The mini-skirt was invented and the Pill revolutionised what had always been lacking in a woman’s psyche. The black man’s cries were resounding in the ghettos and won’t ever be kept silent again. The white woman gradually became self-aware of what her fellow men had tried in vain to keep hidden from her eyes.

Her children too were coming alive, more militant, more out-spoken than their parents ever were. They embraced the Counter-Culture, they read pornographic or banned literature, they smoked marijuana and dabbled with psychedelic rock and roll … and they discovered interracial sex.